Parrot 4.2.0 "Ornithopter" Released!

Submitted by dukeleto on Wed, 03/21/2012 - 12:21

"Technology, in common with many other activities, tends toward avoidance of
risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. Capital investment
follows this rule, since people generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize
how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and
thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our
universe can throw the dice."
-- Assessment of Ix, Bene Gesserit Archives (Heretics of Dune)

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 4.2.0, also known
as "Ornithopter". Parrot (http://parrot.org) is a virtual machine designed
to run all dynamic languages.

Parrot 4.2.0 News:
- API Changes
+ The signature of getprop was changed from (PMC,String,PMC) to
(PMC, PMC,String) for consistency
- Core
+ Parrot Calling Conventions (pcc) now reuses Continuation PMCs
internally, which reduces GC work by 25% and improves
the fib.pir benchmark by 6%
+ Winxed snapshot updated to 1.6.devel 44a04cfa7b
+ Improved the detection of Clang-ish compilers during configuration
+ Fixed a possible segfault bug when reading packfiles with no
constants or main_sub
+ By default, Parrot has now elevated these GCC warnings to errors
during compile time:
implicit-function-declaration, undef, missing-braces,
nested externs, old-style-definition, strict-prototypes,
+ The OS Dynamic PMC now has separate functions to unlink a file
and remove an empty directory (rmdir)
+ Fix building on Cygwin due to an improperly named DLL file
+ Various small bug fixes pointed out by static and dynamic analysis
tools
- Branches
+ Work on M0 continues now in the m0 branch, which contains both
implementations (currently C and Perl) and specification.
+ Good progress has been made on the threads branch which builds
on the green_threads branch. This gets Parrot much closer to
being able to utilize multiple CPU cores seemlessly. More details
at http://niner.name/Hybrid_Threads_for_the_Parrot_VM.pdf
- Documentation
+ New release manager documentation for parrot.github.com :
http://git.io/parrot-github-guide
- Community
+ Parrot was accepted to Google Summer of Code 2012!
Ideas Page: http://git.io/parrot-gsoc-2012

Many thanks to all Parrot contributors for making this possible, and our
sponsors for supporting this project. This release is comprised of 136 commits
on the master branch since 4.1.0, with contributions from : Andy Lester, Vasily
Chekalkin,Jonathan "Duke" Leto, jkeenan, Alvis Yardley Whiteknight, Brian
Gernhardt, Gerhard R, NotFound, Francois Perrad, Moritz Lenz and luben.